Artists

Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler

Press release

Galerie Martin Janda is pleased to present Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler's seventh solo exhibition from 28th November 2025 until 17th January 2026.

Since the early 1990s, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler have been among the central artistic positions of our gallery. The twin sisters became known for their participatory projects, which they developed together with various social groups—such as people with disabilities, prisoners, and children's or youth groups. In these projects, the question of shared or dissolved authorship became a guiding principle: their works are often based on the concept of “multiple authorship,” which they helped to shape and which not only emphasizes their own collaboration but also encompasses the involvement of other actors in the creative process.

These participatory works have been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale (1999) and documenta X in Kassel (1997). Thereby, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler have had a significant influence on the discussion of collaboration and collective production in contemporary art.

In recent years, the artists have expanded their work to include more autonomously developed drawings, paintings, and sculptures—without, however, abandoning the collective dimension of their thinking. Rather, the question of forms of collaborative production continues to permeate their work: as an echo of their early collaborations, as idea, or as a layer of content that touches on both individual and shared perception.

The exhibition INMITTEN VON... (IN THE MIDST OF...) brings together works by Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler from recent years: drawings and sculptures in which materiality, form-finding and process-oriented work intertwine. Additionally, the show features three large-format paintings from the early 2000s, which are being exhibited in Vienna for the first time. The works mark different stages of their artistic careers and at the same time show how consistently the artists have pursued questions of transformation, work processes and forms of perception over decades.

As Hildegund Amanshauser puts it, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler stand out because they “ignore the ‘appropriate code’,” thereby opening up new aesthetic and intellectual possibilities. Their work combines everyday experience, art, nature, and philosophy, making these fields negotiable again as equal spaces of knowledge.

Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, *1964 in Vienna, live and work in Eichgraben and Vienna (AT)